Musings on the Abandonment of Basic Technology  

WorldChanging has a brief note up about the risks of forgetting how the fundamental underpinnings of industrial society work. This is something touched on occasionally by peak oil writers - the need for people to gain skills that would be useful in a lower energy world. If there is a breakdown of globalisation when oil depletion starts to bite, it would be handy to actually have the skills required to relocalise our economies.

I occasionally wonder how many people in the western world these days still have useful skills ? Maybe Douglas Adams' vision of Earth being settled by hairdressers and telephone cleaners wasn't all that far off the mark in Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy...

I'm at an IEEE motor engineering conference right now, and have noticed something interesting: even though it's held in the US, and has been since it started five years ago, 90% of the participants are European or Asian. Even half the professors here from US universities are foreign-born, and one US navy speaker bemoaned how the US is simply not graduating enough engineers to keep the industry going here. American motor engineering is on its way out.

I mention this because the electric motor industry today is where the computer chip industry will be in twenty (maybe ten) years--ubiquitous but mysterious, a technology that is embedded everywhere (from your cell phone to your refrigerator, not to mention the dozen or so motors in your car), and a technology that performs well enough that only a miniscule percentage of the industry still bothers to push the envelope. It's not new and shiny anymore, it's all commodity--a motor designed eighty years ago can be better than one designed today. Computer chips already hit ubiquity, and the banality (or, to be nicer, timelessness) is somewhere on the horizon.

It is important not to forget technologies at that point. Abandoning basic-but-ubiquitous technologies is like abandoning agriculture.