Science and technology’s excellent adventure?
11/01/2006
As semiconductor processing nears physical limits, manipulating technology to push ever further gets steadily more challenging. Over the next few decades as our industry pushes far into the nanorealm, functions may be implemented using a few molecules, perhaps depending on properties other than electronic charge. More functionality may be sought from design cleverness with deeper understanding of how to manipulate patterns rather than simple arithmetic and logic operations. Biology may provide multiple models of how sophisticated tasks can be accomplished without teraflops of brute force calculations, analogous to how compression algorithms now permit faster, less computationally intensive video processing, or neural nets learn to solve problems.
Progress will depend on inventive technologists with sophisticated understanding of a wide spectrum of specialties. Collaboration and team efforts will undoubtedly be essential to push the frontiers of systems science as our ability to shrink devices runs into limits.
All this will be needed just within our sector, but there will be similar advances in many other specialties, such as biotechnology and biomedicine, alternate energy, space exploration, robotics, and materials. We know there will be great demand for more technical specialists because we are already advancing in many fields and we can foresee all of them becoming even more complex as we push frontiers even further.
With the vast potential of these advances, there should be tremendous enthusiasm among the young people who one day might be able to extend our knowledge and provide capabilities to make life richer for millions of people everywhere. But that’s not what we see.
There is great interest in technology careers in the Pacific Rim nations and India, but the attraction there seems more for the opportunity for higher paying jobs than for hopes of making creative contributions to the future. While Europe has some bright spots for budding technologists, in places like Belgium, Germany and France, and even in some of the Eastern European nations, it has tended to lag behind Asia and the US. In the US, with a history of technology leadership, there is little sign of fervor among young people for making future contributions by studying hard to master the intricacies of math and the sciences.
The brightest students aim for careers as investment bankers, hedge fund managers, lawyers, or recently, with the massive reporting requirements fostered by Sarbanes-Oxley, financial executives or accountants. The really big money is for movie/TV stars, rock bands, and athletes (or their representatives).
When scientists and engineers are portrayed in movies or TV, which is seldom, they are usually depicted as nerds with poor social skills who lead boring lives. Kids love electronic gadgets, but for such things as gaming and interacting with friends, not for learning and inventing. In a more mechanical age, things could be taken apart to see how they worked, but what can you find out by examining a microprocessor or a memory chip? The public media considers technology too complicated to explain, so even the few press or TV reports on advances in science and technology are glossed over for the most part with clumsy analogies.
Yet some of the most exciting adventures of the future will involve making remarkable discoveries in science or in creating whole new types of useful and entertaining technology. The young people who do prepare themselves for these quests at the frontiers of knowledge may have much more fulfilled lives than those who are doing leveraged buyouts or juggling stock portfolios. The intersection of biotechnology and electronics remains to be explored, and there are surely better ways to build and operate chipmaking and, in the not-too-distant-future, nanotechnology factories. On the science side, there are still seemingly unfathomable mysteries about the universe and fundamental physics at the nanoscale.
It’s up to us to somehow get that message to those of the next generation so that they will be well prepared to build on all the hard work that has already been done. Perhaps we need occasional movies or TV shows portraying the exciting side of technology and science. To capture the creative spark in our kids, we may need a little help from Hollywood.
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Robert Haavind
Editorial Director