Engineers: Problem-Solvers or Creative Artists?

One aspect of engineering that technical courses don’t address very well is the attitude that an engineer should bring to the task at hand. Because so much of an engineering student’s time is spent solving problems, it’s easy to get into the habit of thinking that solving problems is all engineers do. But as the mystery writer Dorothy Sayers (1893-1957) said in her book The Mind of the Maker, life isn’t a series of problems to be solved, like the whodunits she was famous for writing. Instead, the better approach is to realize that life in all its complexity and ramifications can’t simply be “solved,” except for certain narrowly defined specific cases. Life should be viewed as the raw material for a work of art, and the more creatively we approach life’s issues and difficulties and work within the limitations we are given, the better off we will be.

The Mind of the Maker is an extended comparison between, believe it or not, the creative process and the Christian religious doctrine of the Trinity. I will leave that aspect of it for another time, and concentrate instead on the criticism she makes near the end of the book about a worrisome trend that, as she wrote in 1941, was already dominating the way people thought about social and economic ills.

The mentality she decries is to view large, complicated issues as though they were numbered items at the end of an engineering textbook chapter: namely, problems that with sufficient technical effort and scientific expertise can be solved in a way that clears them up entirely. If anything, this way of thinking has only become more common in the seven decades or so that have elapsed since she criticized it. The “problem-solution” way of thinking has become ingrained in our thought processes so thoroughly that many politicians, economists, doctors, lawyers, and even theologians largely accept it without question. If all these folks think this way, why not engineers?

She answers this question by listing four ways that the kinds of solvable problems she set up in her detective fiction are different from most problems (including engineering problems) that we face in real life. These are, briefly, (1) there is always a solution to the detective-story problem, (2) when the murder mystery is solved, there’s no doubt or loose ends left over, (3) the detective problem is solved within the same framework of ideas that the writer sets out at the beginning, and (4) every detective story has an end. Engineering students can see the strong family resemblance that mystery-story problems bear to engineering-text problems: the same four features are true of both.

Writers of both detective fiction and engineering textbooks have to pose problems in these terms. Neither students nor readers of detective fiction will put up with problems that can’t be solved, leave a lot of loose ends and unanswered questions, require an unexpected type of knowledge to solve, or which go on literally forever. But Sayers’ point is that the problems we deal with in real life can do any or all of these things.

So what good is it to learn how to solve problems? A lot of good, it turns out. As engineering involves a wider variety of disciplines, the technical knowledge that engineers of various stripes acquire in their undergraduate education proves either insufficient for many tasks, or gets outmoded pretty quickly. What doesn’t get outmoded, and what makes engineers increasingly valuable in the rapidly changing world of technological society, is the ability to solve problems that are more complex, more extended, and less well defined than the textbook (or mystery-novel) variety. That’s why a substantial number of engineering graduates go on to work in fields as diverse as medical research, economics, or law: all professional disciplines need people who can solve problems, but they also need people with a wide enough vision to realize that simple-minded “turn-the-crank” solutions can only take you so far.

Sayers’ example of how a creative artist works within the limitations of a medium has lessons for engineers as well. As a classic example, she considers Shakespeare’s play Hamlet. In writing one of his most profound dramas, Shakespeare did not solve a problem, except in the limited sense of having something to attract a season’s patrons of the Globe Theater. He worked within the grand but fixed framework of human nature to explore perpetual issues of loyalty, courage, decision-making, and other matters of the heart and mind that continue to engage audiences today. Was the world any closer to solving these types of problems after Shakespeare wrote his plays? Not in the sense that just a few more years added to Shakespeare’s life would have made any of them go away. But in accepting human nature as it was and portraying it in a timeless way, Shakespeare helped everyone who can read and appreciate his plays to understand life a little better, I think. And understanding is necessary for wisdom.

Engineers rarely think of their activities as being creative, in the same sense that a Shakespeare or a Steven Spielberg is creative. No one but God is truly creative: even the most creative of artists works with the social, historical, and intellectual material at hand. But if we engineers learn to approach real-life problems, not with the mindset of finding “the” unique, cut-and-dried solution, but with the hope of learning about the limitations within which we work, and the human meanings of what we plan to do, perhaps the world will take a more enlightened view of our profession. And we will leave the world, as we eventually must, having made it a better place.

Sources: Dorothy L. Sayers’ The Mind of the Maker was first published in 1941. I used the Harper San Francisco edition of 1987, in which Chapter XI, “Problem Picture” discusses the issues explored in today’s blog.

The Ethics of DVD Rentals: From Blockbuster to RedBox

At first glance, the ways people rent DVDs seem pretty neutral morally (that is, excluding the content of the DVDs: that’s a topic for another time). But these ways have changed a lot in the past decade or so, and anytime there is change in technology there will be winners, losers, and effects that have ethical aspects to them. This is certainly true in the DVD rental market, which has gone through at least two major transitions since about 2000.

DVDs themselves were the eventual death knell for the previous media-storage technology, the videotape cartridge. DVDs were introduced in the U. S. in 1997, the same year that a small company called Netflix was founded. Initially, DVDs were rented (or sold) through the already-established chains of video rental outlets, Blockbuster being the most prominent among many others.

From the consumer’s point of view, browsing at a video rental store was not unlike browsing at a bookstore, especially if the store was independently owned and carried a wider variety of goods than was strictly warranted by volume or profit. There is something about being physically present among a collection of physical objects that facilitates the spontaneous and serendipitous discovery, making one feel like a child exploring an unknown wood. When we moved to Austin for a year in 1999, our favorite independent video store was Vulcan Video, which was (and still is) just that kind of place where you can find the unexpected.

Then Netflix happened, Blockbuster failed to adapt, and the video-store market collapsed, aided by the Great Recession starting around 2008. As people increasingly turned to renting content either by mail or internet streaming, the overhead associated with running a brick-and-mortar store—space, utilities, and above all, salaries—overwhelmed the declining profits, and Blockbuster went bankrupt.

But an outfit named Redbox (initially funded by the fast-food chain McDonald’s, as it turns out) discovered there was still a niche for people who did not want the hassle and commitment of ordering videos in advance by mail, but who still wanted to go get a DVD on Friday night on the spur of the moment. The solution: vending machines.

The vending machine has a surprisingly long pedigree, the first one being invented around A. D. 30 by none other than Hero of Alexandria, who was one of the ancient Greek world’s leading inventors. His machine dispensed holy water in temples in response to the worshipper’s inserting a coin. The concept mostly went dormant for a couple of millennia until an enterprising English bookseller named Richard Carlisle devised a machine to sell books automatically in the late 1800s. From there the idea caught on, with food for the mouth taking precedence over food for the mind in the U. S.: gum, candy, cigarettes (remember cigarette vending machines?), and the ubiquitous soft-drink dispensers spread over the landscape.

So it only makes sense that somebody would try to rent DVDs with vending machines, aided by the ease of networked debit-card and credit-card systems. I suppose that is the way the company enforces late penalties and charges for unreturned media as well, although I have never personally rented a video through Redbox.

The other day, however, I was waiting for my wife outside a drugstore and watched several people rent videos from one of the units. One couple, a guy and his girlfriend, loudly discussed the merits of various DVDs while he was standing in front of the screen and she stood a few yards away at their car door. The screens, complete with little flexible cloth sunshades, aren’t large enough for more than one person to see at a time. Another pair, evidently a woman and her late-teenage daughter, must have flipped through the machine’s entire inventory before picking something. This particular machine has two screens, fortunately, but I can imagine that such dallying with others waiting in line could be discouraging for the impatient. Clearly the leisurely browsing in air-conditioned comfort that the vanished video store provided is a thing of the past. I forecast a big drop in Redbox sales once cold weather hits, too

The phrase “creative destruction” has been used to describe the way advances in technology render superfluous entire business segments, such as the video store. My sympathy is with the thousands of former Blockbuster employees who have now joined the ranks of the (at least temporarily) unemployed. If they were young (most of them were), they can adapt fairly quickly and find other work. They are among the losers in this process.

As for consumers, well, it’s certainly more convenient for me to just run over the couple of blocks to the drugstore and rent a video, instead of driving across town to the former Blockbuster. But I’m not sure I’d want to stand out in the sun (or the cold) and pick through stuff on a touchscreen while perhaps other patrons are standing behind me, figuratively breathing down my neck. I’ve found myself instead looking through the admittedly limited selection of DVDs and antique VHS tapes at the public library. The experience is closer to the video-store one, and somehow the taste expressed by the library’s selections is closer to mine than the kiss-kiss-bang-bang type of DVD featured by Redbox. (That was true of Blockbuster’s selection, too, and is just a function of market demographics in a college town).

Eventually, perhaps, internet downloading will be so cheap and fast that even the Redboxes will find themselves out-maneuvered. But that’s what’s so interesting about living in a free-market economy: nobody knows for sure what will happen next, even the people who are trying to make it happen.

Sources: A good mini-history of vending machines can be found at http://www.gumballs.com/history.html, which I consulted along with articles on Wikipedia about Hero of Alexandria, Redbox, and DVDs.

Electricity Comes of Age: The Flatlining of U. S. Residential Consumption

“Flatlining” is a term from medicine meaning that the patient’s heart and/or brain has ceased to function. U. S. electric utilities are very far from ceasing to function (except for the occasional brownout or blackout), but a recent Associated Press article revealed that the growth of electricity use by U. S. residential customers has slowed or even stopped, and is actually declining by some measures. This is good news for some and perhaps not so good news for others. But first we should put the matter in historical perspective.

The first consumers of mass-produced electricity were businesses and industries, for which electric power meant cash saved or earned when compared to previous ways of doing things. Originally, utilities sought to sell electricity to homes as a sideline, mainly as a way to increase the “load factor,” which means essentially the percentage of time their expensive generating stations were running efficiently at close to capacity. Factories and businesses ran during the day, so having someplace to sell electricity in the evenings was a profitable new business for the utilities to explore. So for most of the twentieth century, the electric utilities’ marching orders to residential customers were to sell, sell, sell. And they did. By about 1925, half of all U. S. residences were wired, and the momentum to do more and more with electricity carried over well into the 1960s. Some of my older readers may recall “Reddy Kilowatt,” a cartoon character fashioned from a light bulb, who urged customers to rely on electric power from everything from clothes drying to brushing your teeth in your new home that sported the all-electric medallion next to the doorbell.

Somewhere around 1980, the tide began to turn. The rise of the environmental movement, the energy crises triggered by oil-cartel actions, and anxiety about nuclear power inspired by the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl accidents combined with concerns raised in the 1990s about global warming and carbon footprints. Add to these cultural factors the hard objective facts that the market for new energy-consuming appliances was pretty well saturated and electric rates were rising, and sooner or later NOT consuming more electricity started to look better than the alternative for many people.

In addition, the deregulation trend finally reached the electric-utility business and fundamentally changed how power companies made money. Until deregulation, state regulatory boards guaranteed the industry a fixed percentage of profit, and the best model was to grow sales so as to increase the absolute profit in dollars. But after deregulation with its accompanying price competition and downward pressure on expenses, encouraging consumers to use less electricity actually started to make sense sometimes, when the alternative was adding expensive generating capacity.

There are many other factors in the current (pardon the pun) flattening of demand, but the portrayal of reducing energy usage as a virtue together with a change in the mix of appliances that use juice probably account for much of the decline in growth. Newer houses and appliances simply use less electricity to do the same thing compared to older models. And one cannot deny that government-supervised incentive programs such as the Energy Star rating system for appliances has played an important role.

A longstanding theme in modern engineering is efficiency, defined broadly as achieving a given result with the minimum use of resources. From the perspective of efficiency, the prospective decline in residential electricity use can only be welcomed, at least to the extent that it represents true gains in efficiency and not simply people using less of everything because they’re out of work, for example. (There is some of that, too.) One can carry this trend to an unhealthy extreme, such as some Europeans have done in designing and living in houses that use no energy for heating or cooling, relying only on incidental heat produced by water heaters and electric appliances. One can do such a thing, but only at the expense of hugely thick insulated walls, a floor plan that approximates an igloo, and exotic measures such as giant air heat exchangers in the basement.

What of the future? If I were an investor, I would look somewhat skeptically at the electric utility business, at least its residential sector, because growth is the fundamental watchword for a capitalist economy. Investing in a no-growth business is not generally perceived as a smart move. If the old regulated system still prevailed, things would be different, and industrial electric usage is still expected to rise for some years. But as the news item pointed out, unless some radical new use for electricity in homes is devised such as the explosive growth of the overnight-charging electric-car market, a declining demand for a commodity is generally a sign that rough financial times lie ahead. State regulation was implemented widely in the 1930s to stabilize a deteriorating private market for electricity, and if something similar happens in the future, deregulation may lose its attractiveness and we may see state regulatory boards stepping in once more.

So will Reddy Kilowatt ride again? I doubt it. No one gives their water utility much thought, largely because it is a well-established industry for which not many new uses are being developed. The same thing may happen to electricity. But the one thing that’s certain about developments in technology is that something no one guessed would happen, is bound to happen sooner or later.

Sources: The Associated Press article on declining growth in residential electricity use in the U. S. appeared in numerous places, and I saw it in the Austin American-Statesman, where it was carried online at http://www.statesman.com/news/nation/shocker-power-demand-from-us-homes-is-falling-1825755.html?cxtype=rss_ece_frontpage.

Is the Internet a Drug?

The dangers of alcohol abuse are too well-known to be questioned, although most societies have decided that the dangers are not so widespread and inevitable as to require absolute prohibition of alcohol use. We tried that in the U. S. from 1920 to 1933 and it is now generally regarded as a failure. A psychiatrist named Elias Aboujaoude has described how one’s use of the Internet can lead to personality changes both online and offline that are just as serious as those resulting from alcohol abuse. When I heard him interviewed recently, it struck a chord with me because I have recently had a couple of experiences that made me think he is right.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, we hosted our ten-year-old nephew for a couple of months this summer. There were many ups and downs in that connection, but the specific effect I noted came after he was allowed (unwisely, on our part) to view hours of YouTube videos produced by teenagers playing certain Nintendo games.

It was interesting to watch the change that came over the boy as he sat on the couch, watching the screen images and wearing headphones because the noise was too much for us to put up with if he played it over the speakers. Hypnotism isn’t too strong a word for it. The worst came when we needed to talk with him for mundane things like getting him to come to supper. The first time I’d speak to him he would almost never respond. So I’d raise my voice slightly, thinking he didn’t hear me through the din of the video game and adolescent narration. When my voice finally registered, it was like the Tasmanian Devil had been disturbed in his lair. “Whaddaya want??!!” is the general tenor of the responses I’d get, none of which were socially acceptable, at least in my book. It would take him several minutes to mentally disengage himself from the machine and get to where he could approximate a reasonable member of society again.

In the child’s defense, he was dealing with some difficulties in his own family, and zoning out on YouTube may have been a kind of coping mechanism. But nothing else he did (with the exception of playing with his Nintendo itself) made him as cranky and rude as watching those YouTube videos.

I also experienced something similar when I went to a retreat center for a couple of days in mid-August. It is in a remote area and set up as a contemplative Catholic retreat, where no talking is allowed. And I had no radio or Internet access. I liked the experience so much that when I came back, I intentionally limited my time on the Internet to strictly work-related matters such as email and looking up specific information. In particular, I dropped my viewing of news sites, which had become a kind of killing-time activity I would do several times a day.

It wasn’t a controlled experiment, because several other things changed at the same time, but I attribute at least part of my noticeable increase in calmness, lack of stress, and feeling more rested to my abstention from what had become a pernicious Internet habit. I may eventually go back to viewing some of those sites on a limited basis, but right now I like the benefits better than whatever enjoyment I got out of them.

Neither I nor my nephew suffered from the more acute maladies that Dr. Aboujaoude sees in his practice of treating sufferers of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Although I have not read his book Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality, in the interview I heard he described five types of problems that can result from spending hours online, especially if one’s participation is more active than just reading or viewing. People who participate in the kind of mob-psychology forums that encourage “flaming” and anonymous posts are particularly susceptible to these problems.

The two problems that struck me as especially insightful were grandiosity, a technical term that means having a self-image that is much better than reality, and narcissism. People with these problems tend to think they are smarter, more important, and much more worth listening to than the average person online, and neglect the needs and feelings of others they encounter. It is a kind of delusion that the Internet encourages: a false image that you are the center of your electronic universe and everything is under your control. The real trouble is that these traits acquired online tend to stay with you in the rest of your life as well. Combine those with regression and impulsivity (two more dangers Aboujaounde has identified), and you get the kind of grossly indiscreet behavior that former U. S. Representative Anthony Weiner confessed to engaging in last June. My initial reaction to the news that someone in such a responsible position sent photos of his naughty bits to not just one, but several women, was disbelief. Rep. Weiner has apparently admitted to extensive online activity of other types as well, and the Internet may have had the effects on him that Aboujaounde describes in his patients. Given enough doses of grandiosity and narcissism, a person might delude himself into thinking that certain personal closeups are exactly what Miss X is wanting to see. Add some impulsivity that would lead you to do something that a little reflection would reveal as foolish, and there you are. Or were—Rep. Weiner eventually resigned.

The Internet doesn’t come in little cardboard boxes that we can put warning labels on, as the federal government requires cigarette makers to do. The hazards are much less quantifiable than smoking, but I think the effects are just as real. In the absence of such warnings, I think it is just up to everyone who uses the Internet for any reason to be aware that it can be habit-forming, and many of the habits it forms are not good ones.

Sources: An online (!) audio publication called Mars Hill Audio (www.marshillaudio.org) carried the interview with Dr. Elias Aboujaounde in their March/April 2011 (Vol. 108) edition. His book Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality was published in 2011 by W. W. Norton.

High-Speed Rail Crash in China: Too Fast Too Soon?

Only four years ago, the first “bullet train” line in mainland China opened to great fanfare. Like tall buildings and modern airports, a high-speed rail line is considered to be a sign that a nation has joined the industrialized world, and Chinese citizens were justly proud of their new high-speed rail lines, which have mushroomed since then. But last July 23, the Chinese high-speed rail industry received a shock that has reverberated to the highest levels of government.

Details are still hard to come by, apparently, and I am working from secondary sources in English. But the basic story appears to be this: On a rail line leading to the coastal city of Wenzhou, a high-speed train was traveling through a thunderstorm. Suddenly, lightning struck. Exactly what it struck is not clear. Some reports say the train itself was hit, disabling it and bringing it to a halt. Other reports say the signaling system was disabled. In any event, lightning crippled either the power or signaling systems or perhaps both, leaving the train stranded on a viaduct some 60 feet above the ground.

Then a second train approached and slammed into the stranded one. Several cars fell to the ground or were derailed, hundreds were injured, and forty people died of their injuries.

The accident was tragic enough, but public reaction intensified when, after a week or so of competitive and often scathing news coverage accusing the government of incompetence and corruption, the government’s censors clamped down on further negative reporting. This sent many citizens to so-called “micro-blogging” sites similar to Twitter, where people can post up to 140 Chinese characters. And they did, criticizing government censorship of investigations into the crash and questions about whether China has rushed into high-speed rail too fast.

Even in the West where media coverage is over-generous, it would take months for an official board to thoroughly investigate a complex accident such as the Wenzhou disaster. So we should not be surprised that a definitive answer to the question of what caused the accident has not yet emerged. China’s premier Wen Jiabao, who has been visibly concerned about the accident starting the day after it occurred, said on Aug. 10 that China was suspending approvals of new high-speed rail projects and taking steps to ensure the safety of existing systems, including lowering maximum speeds temporarily.

All the same, it creates an atmosphere of distrust to issue orders from censorship agencies to quit covering certain topics. Old habits die hard, and the bad old days when electronic media were limited to a single government-run TV station and a few radio channels, plus the party papers, apparently allowed censors to get used to the idea that they could steer public opinion like a farmer steers an ox. But with the proliferation of modern computer-based media, it’s getting harder and harder to steer opinion this way. Even in China, where the government has made strenuous efforts (often abetted by American high-tech companies) to restrain the free flow of information on the Internet, the censorship regime is showing signs of coming unglued. And the rail accident has only put more strain on it.

Still, the government is the only entity which has the resources and access to technical information to investigate the accident in a competent way. I do not know how such investigations are organized in China, but one hopes there is a measure of independence for the technical experts charged with getting the facts straight. In the U. S., the National Transportation Safety Board has a mostly unimpeachable record of independence from political pressure. In all the many accidents I have looked into that were investigated by the NTSB, I do not recall any incidents in which the board’s integrity was ever questioned because of political motives. This doesn’t mean it has never happened or never will. But the fact that most transportation systems in the U. S. are privately owned (AMTRAK being a glaring exception) means there is little political motive to prettify accident reports.

In China, on the other hand, the government has its economic hands in most major undertakings, including high-speed rail. Add that to the heightened sensitivity to criticism that characterizes new kids on the block, and you have plenty of motivation for the Chinese government to whitewash accident reports. Perhaps the lightning strike was a one-in-a-million occurrence that is unlikely to happen again. With six thousand miles of high-speed rail in operation, much of it built in the last four years, the fact that China has not had another major rail accident of this magnitude says something positive about the system. Lightning can do some pretty unpredictable things, and it may turn out that this accident was way down the list of likely problems that the engineers had to consider.

Publicly owned rail systems seem especially prone to engineering ethics controversies. One of the canonical engineering-ethics cases of all time occurred in the 1970s during the testing of a new Bay Area Rapid Transit train system. Some bad technical flaws were covered up and the engineers involved went public, leading to considerable controversy and a classic engineering-ethics story.

Nevertheless, my sympathies are with those who lost loved ones in the Chinese accident. And I hope that the whole controversy surrounding coverage of the accident will lead to greater openness on the part of the government of China, as well as improved safety for millions of Chinese who ride the rails.

Sources: I consulted several news reports on the accident, including coverage by the BBC (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-14262276), Bloomberg and Business Week (http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-07-28/china-high-speed-rail-crash-likely-caused-by-signal-flaw.html), and Reuters (http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/10/us-china-train-idUSTRE77946C20110810 and http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/01/us-china-train-censorship-idUSTRE7700ET20110801). A summary of the BART train incident can be found in Stephen H. Unger’s Controlling Technology: Ethics and the Responsible Engineer (1982).

Self-Driving Cars: Here Sooner Than You Think, Courtesy of Google?

From time to time I have noted the progress being made in autonomous roadway vehicles, otherwise known as self-driving cars. Somebody recently stepped on the gas to speed it up considerably. This time, the progress took place not in a lab, but in a state legislature.

About half a decade ago, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) sponsored a series of highly publicized contests to develop driverless vehicles that would complete a prescribed route many miles long, including some rugged stretches representative of the kind of terrain the military might be interested in traversing. After some embarrassing initial failures, several vehicles successfully completed the route by 2005, including one built by a team led by Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun. Thrun has since become a Google Fellow, and heads that company’s efforts to develop a fleet of autonomous vehicles. This fleet has reportedly logged over 100,000 miles of driving in California traffic, which counts for a lot more miles than driving in ordinary traffic, I’m sure.

It is outside the scope of current motor vehicle laws for an unmanned car to drive down the highway, even if it drives better than your mother-in-law does. While it is not clear who would get the ticket if a cop pulled over a driverless vehicle, I’m sure he’d find a way to blame the passenger for not touching the wheel. With advances in artificial intelligence such as Thrun and others, including researchers at Volkswagen, have made in the last few years, it looks like the technology is beginning to outpace the legal system, which is not an uncommon thing these days.

Just a couple of months ago, legislators in the state of Nevada did what Google has been asking them to do for some time. They passed a law directing the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles to develop a driver’s license endorsement for autonomous vehicles. This means that as early as Mar. 1, 2012, you could take some sort of examination and get a Nevada driver’s license authorizing you to sit in a car that drives itself, and not be pulled over for DWI (Driving While Idle).

Why is Google, of all organizations, so interested in autonomous vehicles? A clue is provided by another law they asked Nevada lawmakers to pass, one that so far the legislators have hesitated to approve. This law would allow drivers of autonomous vehicles to send text messages while behind the wheel they aren’t touching. A little item in (believe it or not) Google Answers states that “Americans collectively spend more than 500 million hours in their cars each week with an average commuting time of 80 minutes per day and growing." Google is probably looking at those 500 million hours a week like the miners of the 1850s gold rush (also in Nevada, it turns out) looked at the Comstock Lode. Put all those folks, or even a good fraction of them, in autonomous vehicles (and give them wireless mobile internet connections provided by, for example, Motorola’s mobile phone division, which Google also purchased recently), and voilá: hundreds of millions of hours a week freed up for people to do whatever they like that will fit inside a car, including surfing the Internet and using guess what? Google! These things aren’t hard to figure out if you think about them a while.

Of course, Google’s public reasons for interest in autonomous vehicles are things like safety and convenience, and these factors are also true. But Google exists because of its bottom line, and employing some of the smartest people on the planet, they know exactly what they’re doing, and it isn’t all altruism, though that may be a useful byproduct.

I foresee bumps on the road to the general use of autonomous vehicles, though. One technical problem, I suspect, will happen when the fraction of autonomous vehicles in use gets so large that chances are good that several driverless cars, most likely made by different companies, will be seeing each other all at once. As smart as Prof. Thrum is, it’s possible that interactions between large numbers of driverless cars will lead to some spectacular unforeseen results, not all of which will be healthy for the occupants. The danger is that a really deadly accident in which autonomous vehicles are involved could cast a black pall over the whole technology and slow down or reverse legislative approval for years. Something similar to this happened after the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl accidents with the nuclear industry, and it has only recently partly recovered from those disasters.

A more remote but still real issue concerns those of us who, as a friend of mine once said, will insist on driving his own vehicle until they have to pry the wheel out of his cold dead fingers. Suppose the technology succeeds so well that insurance companies begin to treat it like safety glass: something that no vehicle should be allowed on the road without, and something that everybody should use. What happens to the freedom of the road to drive your own car in your own way? What happens to motorcyclists, for Pete’s sake? An autonomous motorcycle would be like a man going on his honeymoon by proxy: it might get the job done, but it wouldn’t be near as much fun.

Fortunately, we are a long way from worrying about those kinds of problems quite yet. For me, I would be glad to be relieved of the mostly tedious, dull, and occasionally dangerous task of driving a car, at least for routine commuting purposes. And yes, I probably would surf the Internet some with the time it would free up. But I also might read a book, or nap, or pray, or do any number of other things which would not lead to immediate profits for Google. And so I say to Google: go for it!

Sources: A number of articles appeared in June following the Nevada legislature’s approval of the autonomous-vehicle license law, including one in Forbes (http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2011/06/22/nevada-passes-law-authorizing-driverless-cars/), Geek.com (http://www.geek.com/articles/news/nevada-passes-law-giving-self-driving-cars-the-ok-20110623/), and the Huffington Post (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/24/autonomous-vehicle-law-nevada_n_884307.html). On May 10, 2011, the New York Times published an in-depth piece on Google’s research and lobbying efforts in this area at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/11/science/11drive.html?_r=1.

Small Businesses Hacked; Banks Say Not Their Business

Say you run a dry-cleaning company with three outlets, or a restaurant, or a machine shop with thirteen employees. You have an account with a bank, possibly a smaller bank that isn’t in the major leagues. Like most people these days with bank accounts in the U. S., you deal with your bank electronically as well as in person. You log onto your bank’s website daily and transfer funds, pay bills, do payroll, and most of the other financial operations that a small business requires. And you probably have some accounting software on your business computers that interfaces somehow with the bank’s software.

Everything’s rolling along okay until one fine morning, when you open up your accounting software, update your balances from the bank, and find that instead of the thousands of dollars you had there yesterday, there’s zero dollars and zero cents—or even that your $10K line of credit with the bank that you haven’t touched in months is suddenly maxed out. You get on the phone with the bank. After some heated conversations with the bank’s information technology (IT) people, you discover your accounts have been hacked. And the bank says that because it was your system that was hacked, not theirs, that you are out of luck. They won’t make good your losses.

According to a recent blog post in the online edition of IEEE Spectrum, the amount of physical cash stolen in old-fashioned bank heists (less than $50 million a year in the U. S.) is dwarfed by the amount of money hacked from small-business bank accounts, which is upwards of $1 billion annually. Unlike regulations covering consumer credit-card accounts, which have a $50 maximum loss ceiling that most banks honor, there is no law protecting small businesses against similar kinds of fraud. So unless a small company can prove in court that the bank itself was at fault and not the company’s IT system, that money is just as gone as if a thief broke into the office safe and walked away with it. But in the case of physical cash, there’s usually no question about who the money was stolen from. Digital cash is different.

Money is an interesting philosophical concept. I was in my forties before a historian of technology made me realize that the monetary value of gold is not an intrinsic objective property, like atomic weight. Considered analytically, money is just an elaborate symbolic system humans have devised to keep track of economic value. Whether money is stored in the form of dollar bills, gold bars, or bits on some server somewhere, it is fundamentally an agreement among people that certain physical states of the universe correlate with a certain distribution of wealth among individuals and groups.

That being the case, there is a fundamental distinction between physical theft, which is what happens when someone with a gun holds up a real bank and runs off with real bills; and cybertheft, where by fraud some hackers make certain numbers in one computer system go down and certain other numbers in their own accounts go up. In this regard, hacking small business accounts is in the same category as check forging. In both hacking and forging, a third party or parties are made to believe something false.

What has this got to do with the question of who should shoulder the responsibility for hacking small business accounts? In a more leisurely era, there might be a real chance of simply catching the crooks and making them give back the dough. But the famous fungibility of money (the ease with which it is converted into other things of value) goes double for digital cash, which can be laundered, converted, disguised, and transferred around the world in seven minutes or less, beating Shakespeare’s Puck by a good measure. Hackers are notoriously difficult to catch, and by the time they are caught the money they steal is almost always unrecoverable. So in reality, the question boils down to who is left holding the empty bag: the small-business owner or the bank?

The fact that there is some dispute about this in the various court cases that have been brought to trial, reflects the fuzziness of computer systems with regard to the question of whose pieces are whose. If your business software transfers data back and forth to your bank, who is to say where one system ends and the other one begins? Maybe we should all gang up on the rooms full of programmers who worked out the compatibility standards for both systems. After all, they are ultimately responsible for the way the system ended up, including any vulnerabilities. But nowhere have I seen that anyone considers going after the programmers or engineers who put these systems together. Instead, the banks who hire them are the main targets of lawsuits, because, as all good bank robbers know, that’s where the money is.

I wish I had a gold-plated surefire answer to this ethical issue, but I don’t. The best I can do is urge caution all around, especially where “phishing” attacks are concerned. If what you think is your bank’s website looks the least little bit funny, stop what you’re doing and double-check everything. That way you might be able to avoid a very costly mistake.

Sources: Robert Charette’s blog post entitled “Business Phone or Bank Account Hacked? It's Your Toaster” appeared on Aug. 12 in the online edition of the magazine for electrical and electronic engineering professionals IEEE Spectrum at http://spectrum.ieee.org/riskfactor/telecom/security/business-phone-or-bank-account-hacked-its-your-toaster.

Betting on Methanol

The U. S. dependence on foreign oil imports is a little like what Mark Twain said about the weather: everybody complains about it, but nobody does anything about it. My metaphorical hat is off to entrepreneur and author Robert Zubrin, who, in a small way, is trying to do something about it. Zubrin has offered to wager up to $100,000 (presumably his own money) that he can make his recent-model Chevy Cobalt run on methanol with better fuel economy than it gets with gasoline.

Why methanol? In a previous column in National Review, Zubrin explained some of its advantages compared to gasoline and even ethanol. Methanol (also known as wood alcohol) has the chemical formula CH₃OH. It can be produced at low cost (Zubrin says the going price is currently $1.28 per gallon) from a wide variety of carbon-containing materials: oil, coal, natural gas, and almost any biomass material, even wood (the name comes from an early production method involving the destructive distillation of wood). The chemistry for producing methanol is fairly straightforward, in contrast to ethanol, which is most easily obtained from sugar-containing foodstuffs (e. g. corn) used in a fermenting process. Although most cars cannot burn pure methanol because it attacks certain kinds of rubber seals and has different combustion characteristics than gasoline, many recent models have fuel lines and software that will allow the use of methanol and other flexfuels with only minor modifications. I am sure Zubrin, a smart engineer, has either done this or knows people who have, and so is fairly sure to win his bets.

So what if he does show that his Cobalt can get 24 mpg on methanol? Will he have done anything more than pulled a publicity stunt profitable to himself? His wider goal is to make a point about the inertia of our present transportation fuel system and how it could be radically improved.

Increasingly, newer technology is advancing beyond the shell-like fossilized regulatory and infrastructure environment in which earlier technology developed, and the environment often blocks adoption of the new technology. As Zubrin points out, adapting a car of today to a different kind of fuel is a much simpler matter than it was thirty years ago, when one would have to do extensive mechanical modifications to the carburetor, valve lifters, and other parts, costing many thousands of dollars to complete. But the nation’s fuel infrastructure and regulatory environment developed around such facts. Now that the facts have changed, we are stuck with a distribution and legal system based on the assumption that cars will run on gasoline or diesel fuel forever, amen. If by some miracle, methanol refining plants running on natural gas or coal sprang up all over the country and methanol filling stations were built to service flexfuel cars, the road tax system of every state would be severely challenged, because most states receive revenues based on a fixed charge per gallon of gasoline sold. If gasoline sales plummet, so do road tax revenues.

Of course, the one thing lawmakers are still pretty good at is passing new tax laws, so this problem would be addressed promptly if methanol became a significant part of the transportation-fuel market. The best thing about such a development from Zubrin’s point of view is that unlike petroleum, the U. S. has abundant coal and increasing amounts of natural gas reserves. And methanol can be made from either coal or natural gas.

A believer in the free market, Zubrin does not call for a methanol subsidy, which like the current Federal law mandating ethanol in gasoline would further distort the market and lead to unexpected negative consequences. He simply wants most new cars to be flexfuel-capable in fact as well as in theory, and feels if this happens, the market will do the rest. If your car could burn either gasoline or methanol, and you drove by two filling stations, one with gasoline at $3.55 a gallon and one with methanol at a fuel-economy-equivalent price of $2 a gallon, which would you buy? Such no-brainers are how the market works, and pretty soon gasoline marketers would find they have a price ceiling to contend with.

We have seen calls for major shifts in the nation’s transportation-fuel infrastructure before. Who remembers President George W. Bush’s call for a hydrogen-based economy in twenty years? As attractive as it might have been politically, hydrogen is a relatively poor choice for a transportation fuel. To carry around enough hydrogen to take you more than a few miles, you need extremely high-pressure tanks to contain the compressed gas. The problem is even worse than it is with natural-gas-fueled vehicles, which have made very limited inroads in mostly municipal fleets where a city can build its own supply station. Methanol, although not quite as easy to handle as gasoline, is a lot better in this regard, because its energy density is higher than hydrogen or other fuel gases. Another advantage of methanol compared to gasoline is its biodegradable characteristics. It breaks down into carbon dioxide and water in a few days if released into the environment, unlike gasoline, some of whose toxic components can persist for years in the ground.

I wish Zubrin the best of luck in his wagers. He’s willing to break down his $100,000 bet into as many as ten $10K pieces. If I had that kind of money lying around, I would be tempted to take him up on it. Not because I think he’ll lose, but because it would be fun to participate in a publicity stunt that may turn out to be a prophetic event.

Sources: Zubrin has published two articles recently on methanol as a transportation fuel, both in the online edition of National Review. The July 27 article can be found at http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/272685/tripling-america-s-fuel-production-robert-zubrin?page=1 and the one in which he issues his betting challenge appeared on Aug. 2 at http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/273285/fuel-efficiency-bet-robert-zubrin.

The Transient and the Enduring: Rereading "A Canticle for Leibowitz"

Films and novels are not the usual fare in this blog, but every so often I come across a fictional work that embodies a truth so important to engineering ethics that I want to bring it up. Such a work is Walter M. Miller Jr.’s prize-winning sci-fi trilogy A Canticle for Leibowitz, which I recently reread after seeing it mentioned by another blogger whose name I’d mention if I could remember it.

The book combines what at first glance seem an unlikely pair of premises: the near-destruction of the world by a nuclear war (the book was published in 1960, at the height of the Cold War), and the 1700-year history of a Roman Catholic monastic order founded shortly after the nuclear war in order to preserve scraps of knowledge that escaped the flames. At the time Miller was writing, two things seemed nearly certain. One was that sooner or later, some madman would start a nuclear holocaust. The other was that the Roman Catholic Church, which was then near the zenith of its post-World-War II flourishing in the U. S., would endure no matter what.

Regarded strictly as technological prophecy, Miller’s work scores pretty well. Toward the end of the book there are dictation-taking computers (which break down), self-driving automobiles, and interstellar space flights. But of far more interest are the essential points of conflict that Miller explores between the oldest continuously functioning institution of Western culture (the Catholic Church) and the scientists, technologists, and government agents with whom the monks of the Order of St. Leibowitz have to deal.

It would be hard to make a movie out of the novel, but it has a few memorable scenes of cinematic quality. In one, a clever monk, after piecing together scraps of technical information, has managed to build a dynamo-powered arc lamp, the first electric lighting the world has seen in several hundred years. It works great as long as the four monks pushing the cartwheel in a circle don’t get tired out. In order to avoid spoiling the story for those who haven’t read it, I won’t give the context of the second scene. But it involves a fight (first verbal, then physical) between the abbot of the monastery and a government-paid doctor who wants to set up a portable euthanasia center and crematorium for victims of radiation poisoning who are beyond help.

Every age asks questions about fundamental issues: What is life for? What should we do with wealth and power? How should we deal with knowledge? In his novel, Miller takes the answers that the Church has had two millennia to refine, and contrasts them with the answers that the secular world typically comes up with. Tribal chieftains commit gruesomely gory murders; civilizations rise, destroy each other with nuclear bombs, and rise again; cultures forget nearly everything that makes modern civilization possible, and then slowly re-acquire the scientific and technological knowledge that previous ages had achieved. In all this, the monks of St. Leibowitz play relatively minor roles on a larger scale. But the continuity of their own records and the fact that theirs is the only historical memory that endures, creates a thread that ties the different ages together and brings up recurring themes.

Where Miller was truly prophetic, I think, was the way that the Church has preserved its stance on the absolute sanctity of life as the shifting legal sands have washed away prohibitions on first abortion, and now euthanasia in some states. When the book came out, the infamous Roe v. Wade decision was thirteen years in the future. But its promulgation brought to reality a forecast that Miller made, which was that the Church would always protest the taking of innocent life—whatever the age of that life, whatever its form (healthy or handicapped), and whatever its usefulness to society. Canticle is a working out in fictional form of various ways that technological man can go wrong, both individually and collectively.

To his credit, Miller poses no easy answers. A colleague I recently loaned the book to said it was “dystopic,” and I suppose that’s one way to look at it. But as engineers know, you can sometimes learn more from mistakes and accidents than from successes. A Canticle for Leibowitz is a long case study in how 1950s-era technology (most of which is still with us today) can go wrong and combine with original sin to do really bad things. There are a lot of things to avoid doing in this novel. And the heroes, such as they are, are men and women of faith. That, too, is a lesson to ponder, I think.