–>Former vice president Al Gore made an impassioned plea to embedded designers here to have the courage to answer the call of “the moral imperative of our day”: climate change.
“You have to ask different questions [when designing] that will take advantage of the opportunities presented by the crisis,” he said.
Gore listed three long-term effects on the climate crisis: population, technology and mindset. “For the most part, the effect of population on our climate is balancing itself out over many years, while technology has dramatically accelerated the rate of which the climate has been affected over the past fifty years,” he said. ”Yet the worse culprit is the way we think about the crisis.”
We have “grossly inefficient systems running our energy economy”…”apply the principles of parallel processing to alleviate inefficient computing paradigms.”
“We are very fast becoming less competitive globally because youngsters do not feel engineering is a worthwhile profession to pursue,” said Gore.
“You can make a difference by showing that engineering can change the way the world crisis can be averted–only if we can raise the importance of this endeavor to the wake-up call Sputnik [first space satellite launched by the Soviet Union] had for America in the 1960s,” he said.
“Once the possible threat was understood, President [John F.]Kennedy’s goal of landing a man on the moon was achieved fairly quickly,” he said. “It is a moral imperative that brings the thinking around to do something about a threat–you can play that role every day in your design work and thereby show the next generation of engineers that they can become part of something larger than themselves.
|
Movin' Ahead 