Most professional engineers work for pay, and that leads to
an interesting question: which is
more important, the work or the pay you get for it? I bring up that question after reading an essay on work by
the well-known medievalist C. S. Lewis.
In the essay, Lewis distinguished between two types of
work. The first type is work that
is worth doing for its own sake.
Some professions are automatically included in this classification: teachers (Lewis was a professor at
Oxford), doctors, pastors, and other members of the helping professions, for
instance. As long as members of
these groups do their work faithfully and competently, they should have no
problem looking themselves in the mirror and saying, “I’m glad I do what I do,
because it makes the world a better place.” There are other types of work that can fit into this first
category, and I’ll get to those in a minute.
The second kind of work is done merely to get a
paycheck. The thing you do for the
paycheck is almost irrelevant: it
is simply a means to the end of getting money. Now there is nothing intrinsically wrong about earning
money. In a fallen world, money
and economics are inescapable aspects of existence. But if you make money your No. 1 priority and aren’t too
particular about how you get it, you can end up doing things that, at best, are
unnecessary for the world’s betterment, and at worst, positively harm
others. Scam operators, burglars,
and drug dealers all get money, but the legal system has objections to their
methods.
Where do engineers fit into all this? There is no easy general answer to that
question. I think the question of
pay is high on the list of most young engineering graduates early in their
careers. It’s the first thing they
often mention when you ask them what they’ll do after graduation: “go out and earn some bucks!” But with their special expertise and
competencies in design, engineers at least have a chance to wind up doing the
first kind of job: one that is intrinsically
worth doing on its own merits, regardless of the pay scale.
Besides engineering tasks that serve the obvious helping
professions, I think a wide variety of other kinds of engineering jobs are
worth doing on their own. What if
the thing you help create doesn’t directly help people, in the sense of medical
treatments and so on, but is a thing of beauty—an artistic creation that helps
others see the world in a way they had not seen it before? Take, for example, the platoons of
engineers needed to make an animated film these days, the kind that takes the
natural world seriously and attempts to portray it the way it really looks and
acts.
If you peruse the output of the Association of Computing
Machinery’s annual SIGGRAPH conferences (many examples of which are on
YouTube), you will find an amazing array of animations of everything from hair
blowing in the wind, to cannonballs blasting through realistic curtains, to
ribbons tying themselves into realistic knots. These things wind up in almost unnoticeable corners of
animated films, but they add realism and depth as the engineers behind the
scenes overcome the challenges of using great but limited computing power to
portray the way physical objects really interact with each other. The audience gets to see only those
simulations that worked. The ones
that blow up or produce screen confetti end up on the digital cutting-room
floor, and serve as stepping stones along the way to success.
A less straightforward example of engineering that is worth
doing is the work of engineers who create machines that do work formerly done
by people. The chairman of
Foxconn, the company that makes iPhones and employs over a million people
worldwide, says that he wants to replace as many of his workers as he can with
robots. Three-dimensional printers
that turn CAD drawings into working machines with moving parts are on the
market now—my school is thinking of buying one, so you know they can’t be that
expensive. The story of
technological unemployment is at least as old as the Industrial Revolution, but
signs are that it’s going to be a huge factor in the worldwide economy in the
next few years. And
engineers are behind all the technology that will let Foxconn run with more
robots than people, if that ever comes to pass.
Does this mean that engineers will eventually work
themselves out of a job, like the mythical snake that started eating its own
tail until it disappeared? Some
people think so. A group calling
itself the Transhumanists believe computers will soon become smarter than
people and basically take over the world, leaving behind the old-fashioned
“meat-cage” models of people who are based in natural biology.
Those of us with a Christian worldview know this isn’t
possible, however, because machines don’t have spirits. You could in principle have a world
full of machines busily making other machines and exchanging bits and so on,
but without humans there would be no spirit and no life. There might be a great deal going on in
that world, but without anyone to see it, it would be a dead world, as dead as
the moon.
The thing called a human being is an amalgam of spirit and
matter, and exists because of love.
To the extent we recognize that fact, we are guided into the right
occupation and work for the right reasons. To the extent we forget it, we play into the hands of those for
whom money is everything, and for whom love is simply another overhead expense
to be eliminated.
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